Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I did not want to get to technical, but you seem to really want do this., I will show how to do this with jQuery in a way that search engines will not find.

I would suggest having a real link to your contact page from your homepage so that your address and contact details are found.

From every other page do something like this
Contact Us

then you need some javascript, you will need jquery

$(document).ready(function () {   $("[data-contact-page]").click(function () { document.location = "/contactpage.html";     });
});

Paul is correct, most web sites have this problem, there is not a lot you can do about it because most of the time you need a contact page link on every page.

but don't think of it as one way, remember link juice flows back out of the contact page. The page rank calculations are done many times not once, until the page rank settles on the pages it does. For this reason I have to disagree that internal links can only pass a little pagerank, the more external links you have the more pagerank the internal links spread , so you are correct the way you sculpt your links is very important.

Yes that's classic asp

what sort of server is it on windows?

What sort of webserver IIS? if so what version, if it is 7 or greater it is very easy to do your redirects if you have access to the controlpanel

you are correct, it want do the index.html or default.asp

but this rule will solve all your domain problems, not the "!" mean not, so if not the desired domain, then redirect to the desired domain not matter what the domain is. this will fix non www, or any other secondary domain you may have such as oldDomain.com or mergedSite.com

Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

but if you have a page called default.asp. your site is a classic ASP site, ASP is a Microsoft technology and would be on a Microsoft web server IIS. if so 301 redirects are very easy to do.

Is your site ASP.is it on a Microsoft IIS server?

Depends on the site, if the site is Microsoft.com with a link from the home page, you can expect it to appear same day.
If its on boringoldsite.com then it could take a week or more.
But mostly a few days

I would expect penguin to be sudden.
What your problem sounds like to me, is slowly your links are being discounted as google finds them. Do you have a lot of rubbish links?

no but bold does, all be it not much

Bold not using css, but overdoing this will look spammy to SE's as well as users

There are many reasons why Google do this, but it may be that they think you are keyword stuffing.

I think the point is,
mydomain.com/Page.html 301's to mydomain.com/page.html
but mydomain.com/page.html?x=y canonicals to mydomain.com/page.html

so in this case both have a function.

but having said that I would fix the links to mydomain.com/Page.html as using a 301 leaks link juice, they are good when correcting a external link, but an internal link should be fixed by fixing the link itself.

If a page has 5 links, the page rank will be split between those 5 links and will flow to the pages they point to. There are some modifiers to this, but general its 20% per link.

if you no-follow one of those links, 20% of your page rank will be lost. It will be wasted. it is better that your contact page gets it. If you have a link back to your home page from your contact page. you will get some back.
how pagerank works http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

It wasn't me either.

$thetimeis = getdate(time()); $thehour = $thetimeis['hours']; $theminute = $thetimeis['minutes']; $thesecond = $thetimeis['seconds'];
        if($thehour > 12){ $thehour = $thehour - 12; $dn = "PM";
        }else{ $dn = "AM";
        }

echo "$thehour: $theminute:$thesecond$dn"; ?>

What do you mean by "We have deployed a couple updates to render pages for the bots" that sounds like clocking?

Agree with Paul here.

A 301 is a directive to the crawler, while a canonical tag is only a hint and is not always followed. Bing for one will ignore canonical tags if it believes they are misused.

as for the mention of "multiple 301 redirect" .

You do not need to have a 301 redirect for every url, just follow the logic
if HTTP_Host is not myPreferredDomain then redirect to myPreferredDomain

Depends on how unique the pages are.

if the pages using params are quite unique then I would just leave them be, if they are no very unique then using the canonicals the best bet.

1 Yes, Bing have stated that they will ignore the sitemap if it is not accurate

2. no

3, no

4 yes

5 no, use priorities for that

6  looks ok

I would look into using the Google and Bing sitemap generators, problem solved (if you have access to the server)

http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2013/05/23/bing-sitemap-plugin-1-0-launch.aspx
http://googlesitemapgenerator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/gsg-installation.html

Yes you can not force indexing it is always up to the search engine.

In a small site a sitemap is next to useless really. sitemaps help the search engine find and decide what to crawl. in a small site with all pages linked its going to find them anyhow. in a large site it could be a good thing to show what has changed, where to find new links and maybe pages that are not linked.

I read a post by bings Duane Forrester where he explained that they will lose trust in your site map if it has errors more then 2%. all entries should return status code 200, no 404's or redirects.

He also said that you should not include all pages, just places where you want bing to start crawling from, or where you want to discover links.

Max is correct.

There seems to be a myth that 301's do more than redirect a request. I have heard people saying that you can 301 page authority, good will, domain age and other nonsense, a 301 simply redirects a request.

If you have external links pointing to old site, then handle them to your best advantage using a 301 redirect, otherwise you have nothing to worry about

If you can do a 301 you should be able to do a 404

302 and 307 are the same except for one small thing, with a 307, the redirect must be the same method as the original request, if the original was a GET then the redirect must be a GET, if it was a POST the redirect must be a POST.
A 302 allows for a change in method, but who ever changes the method? just use a 302